Roland Barthes Quotes

For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of much more recent origin than has been heretofore supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

Language is generated by the intellect and generates the intellect.

Language always pre-exists us: it is always already 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it.

Ideas do not exist separately from language.

It is impossible to disassociate language from science...To call forth a concept, a word is needed.

It's as if we're higher apes who had a language faculty inserted.

Hominid and human evolution took place over millions and not billions of years, but with the emergence of language there was a further acceleration of time and the rate of change.

The ability to write and read books is one of the things that transformed us as a species.

What is it that really makes us, us? It's our collective intelligence. It's our ability to write things down, our language and our consciousness.

If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological - indeed, genetic - goal.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.

Was there a little time between the invention of language and the coming of true and false?

Today, there are over 7,000 languages spoken throughout the world. They may sound different, but in every case, they're drawing on the same regions of the brain. If you had told me that stone-tool-making had something to do with our ability to speak, I would have said you've got rocks in your head, but the latest studies indicate that once Homo erectus got creative with stone, our brains were on the way to inventing the most powerful tool of all: language.

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.

It's commonly assumed that the emergence of language was a key element of the great leap. We of course know very little about the sociopolitical conditions that existed at the time, but there's no scenario I can think of that suggests how a sudden change in these conditions could have led to the emergence of language.

It seems inconceivable that a species of human could possess fully modern language and not be fully modern in all other ways, too. For this reason, the evolution of language is widely judged to be the culminating event in the emergence of humanity as we know it today.

Language is the picture and counterpart of thought.

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or understand or explore.

Language, as symbol, determines much of the nature and quality of our experience.

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.